History, and more particularly the history of military thought in the West, would benefit from being exploited more by analysts, because at the heart of this interstate struggle, the past provides us with lessons or at the very least clues on the practice of war present in the Russian and Ukrainian camps.
While military thinking flourished in Europe in the 16and-XVIIand centuries, in the Age of Enlightenment, philosophers adopted a positivist approach with what they call the mechanical part of war: seen as a science, war derives from past battles universal principles that should frame its practice. […] If this way was neglected by the Enlightenment, which valued the scientific approach, the German romanticism of the XIXand century led Prussian officers to take an interest in it. The most illustrious of them being Carl von Clausewitz, whose work published by his widow in 1832, Of the warholds timeless keys to tackling war between states.
“War is the continuation of politics by other means”: for Clausewitz, war is part of the specific context of his time. For the Prussian general, who knew how to draw lessons from the Napoleonic wars, of which he is a veteran, experience prevails over knowledge. By reflecting on the extreme violence of war (and in particular what he calls the escalation to extremes) and the attachment of political ends to all military action, Clausewitzian thought has spanned the centuries and remains relevant, since the political ends of wars have always been the driving force behind confrontations.
If the high-intensity interstate conflicts in Europe had been lost sight of since 1945, the Russian invasion of Ukraine plunges us back into this reality that asymmetrical conflicts had made us forget in the West. Clausewitz’s thinking picks up again with what Russia is showing us in Ukraine, a return to the classic WWII and Soviet era of deep operations and the deployment of fire-supported units .
A grand duel
The Russian army does what it knows best by fighting like an army of the XXand century, which is not without creating weaknesses: rigid army with a centralized command, massive use of artillery before the occupation of the ground, little consideration with regard to the combatant, problems of logistics.
For Clausewitz, war between States is nothing but a large-scale duel in which it is a question of beating one’s enemy (role of the army) in order to impose one’s will on him (the goal defined by politics). To achieve this, he defines the concept of the “remarkable trinity”, where the war consists of three levels: the goal (the government sets the political end); the means (the soldier leads the action to impose the goal); passion (the people, the essence of violence to achieve the goal).
Presidents Zelensky and Putin define the political goals at stake: for Russia, there is this desire to make Ukraine a satellite state and a buffer zone facing the West and the spread of NATO towards the Russian border. For Zelensky, it is a national defense struggle. The military means mobilized are conventional (with nevertheless the Russian threat of the rise to extremes with the use of nuclear power). For passion, if Ukraine presents the war in the eyes of the world as resistance to the invader, Russia mobilizes a patriotic discourse that is significant for the Russians with this link made with the patriotic war of 1941-1945, the war in Ukraine being only a defense of Russian territory against the Ukrainian “Nazis”.
Clausewitz also allows us to clearly understand the course of the action since in Of the war, it differentiates the tactical objective, which is in the military field with a view to victory over the enemy on the ground, from the political or strategic objective, which is the achievement of the set goal. However, the latter can evolve according to the military results on the ground. For the Russians, in the face of unexpected resistance from the Ukrainians, Putin revised his political goals. After initially targeting the Ukrainian center of gravity by attacking kyiv, the Russian objective today is the territorial conquest of Donbass and Crimea.
Leveling out the asymmetry of means
Of the asymmetry of means between the Russian and Ukrainian armies, a Clausewitzian fact helps us better understand what we are observing, namely a defensive war on the part of the Ukrainians: “the conduct of war in its defensive form is in itself more stronger than the offensive. This choice gives an army overwhelmed in number by an adversary the ability to face him in order to level the asymmetry of means.
To do this, the defender takes advantage of: the terrain (the Ukrainians are at home); surprise (use of drones, attacks on convoys); the attack on several fronts (the Ukrainians do not practice the Maginot Line syndrome, but resist everywhere, a defeat at one point does not involve the whole army in any way); the use of fortified places (in the 21stand century, we speak of urban combat which is to the advantage of the defender by neutralizing the technical and numerical advantages of the assailant); popular support (support of Ukrainians for their government); exploitation of moral force (success of the communication war of the Ukrainians).
“We always know much less about the state and measures of the enemy than we presuppose when we sketch the project. So Clausewitz was dealing with what he describes as the fog of war where, and Putin paid the price for it, you should never judge a war won on paper until it has been carried out in the field with all the unforeseen events that may arise during its unfolding and in the face of which it is necessary to constantly adjust.
Clausewitz tells us that a people who defends its territory cannot surrender and that if its army falls, from defensive warfare, we pass to the stage of defensive combat. In this case, we are talking about guerrilla warfare or resistance in order to wear down the enemy over time. Clausewitz then speaks of the people in arms, an index which gives us a glimpse of a long-term conflict, a conflict for which it will be difficult for the Russians to declare victory (we can see this very well with the resistance in Mariupol).